This research, conducted through a qualitative study supported by an ethnographic approach, focuses on the work experiences and daily life of state bureaucratic workers who provide support to adolescents involved in the juvenile justice system in detention facilities in the city of Rosario. These workers began their roles in 2008 within the framework of implementing comprehensive child protection policies. This study investigates these experiences, taking into account the local implementation of national and international guidelines on youth and crime, specific institutional spaces, and daily work practices.

The resulting material offers an explanatory description of the daily configurations through which the subjects live and find meaning in their work within detention facilities, with a focus on how they perceive the practice of “supporting in confinement.” Thus, the various chapters focus on the analysis of the relationships the workers establish with the adolescents; the ways in which confinement is experienced and its effects; the development and theorization of work practices; the significance of state work and the construction of relevant organizing bodies; the relationships with other workers, managers, and civil servants; the ways in which workers experience suffering and discomfort related to their tasks; and the particular characteristics that their reconfiguration acquired during the pandemic.

Based on the performed analysis, it is argued that the experience of “supporting in confinement” expresses complex and ambivalent relationships with the institutional organization of work processes in the detention facilities. This results in a network of routines, practices, guidance, enthusiasms, discomforts, meanings, and heterogeneous moral values that provide texture to the implementation of the comprehensive protection paradigm in local contexts. From this understanding, this thesis constitutes a contribution to the field of inquiry on state bureaucracies related to the treatment of the juvenile justice system, identifying the appropriations, conflicts and tensions that arise in local and specific work processes.

Keywords: Ethnography – Bureaucracy – Work – Daily life – Adolescence – Prison.